New meanings of Panafricanism in the era of globalisation

macro-economic strategies prescribed by the multilateral institutions and the corporate
puppeteers behind the scenes of the world stage, on which they like to strut at Davos,
Geneva, New York, Washington and elsewhere.
In a devastatingly honest and surgical analysis of the African condition, Colin Leys,
almost 10 years ago demonstrated that the colonial legacy will take many years and a
combination of improbable developments to be eliminated. In particular, he points to the
fact that under colonial rule, “household production of commodities replaced household
production for subsistence and local exchange…” and that this resulted in the destruction
of “the precolonial economies and the social orders based on them, without putting in
their place economies or social systems capable of defending themselves against ‘world
market forces’ after independence” (Leys 1994:44-45). Five years later, together with
John Saul, he described Africa south of the Sahara (excluding South Africa) as a place
where there is “some capital but not a lot of capitalism” (Saul and Leys 1999). Our
understanding of the reasons for the tragedy of Africa in the modern world has been
enhanced by many incisive analyses but in the short time at my disposal, I cannot enter
into the specifics of any of them. Suffice it to say that the failure of the postcolonial
African state and the initially populist orientation of most post-independence African
governments culminated in the domino-like collapse of most of them after the oil priceinduced
economic crisis of the mid-1970s. The structural adjustment prescriptions of the
Bretton Woods institutions that were supposed to restore the economies of these states to
health notoriously exacerbated their condition and catapulted most of them into the debt
trap, where they languish up to this day 9 .
Today, there is hardly any publicist or analyst that does not record and lament the fact
and the scale of the marginalisation of the continent. Inevitably, suggestions for solutions
have oscillated between accepting a kind of recolonisation of the continent, with effective
government and decision-making taking place from Northern capitals, and what has been
called (by Ndegwa 1992) “collective self-reliance for economic recovery and growth”. In
9 For a useful review of the process, see Bond 2001:17-28.
10